Lessons in Duck Hunting

by Jayne Buxton

  I walk into my meeting ten minutes late to find Nicki, Paul Delaney and two junior agency staff huddled over something at one end of the conference table. They all look up as I enter, then Nicky beckons to me.

  “Ally, quick. I think you’re going to love this.”

  Laid out on the table are three sheets of A2 card, each one with a mock-up on it. The sunset and beach from Paul’s earlier efforts are still in evidence in the first drawing. Only the beach isn’t some white-sanded Bahamian paradise, but an English beach, with flat brown sand and pebbles. And instead of a vaguely stomach churning shot of a couple cooing under some marmalade jars at a sea-front bar, there is a picture of a bear eating marmalade from a jar with his hands. It’s Paddington Bear, in his floppy red hat, sitting on a decrepit-looking suitcase covered in stickers. The caption says Seville Sunset. Good enough to tempt a bear to an English beach.

  I look up from the picture at four expectant faces. Only Nicki’s is confident. Paul has the look of a rabbit who’s expecting a fox to leap from the undergrowth at any moment.

  “It’s Paddington Bear,” I say unnecessarily. “Good idea.”

  Paul can hardly wait to fill me in on just how good an idea it is. “Great, isn’t it? When I heard you on the radio last week I thought ‘That’s it!’ All that stuff you reminded us of—about marmalade’s fascinating history, and the famous people who’ve loved it in the past, it just seemed too good to waste. And perfect for launching a new and different marmalade. Look at the next two.”

  I look down at the table at the second picture, which I can now see is of Mary Queen of Scots on a ship’s bed, being spoon-fed marmalade by a toothless sailor, with a tawny orange sunset just visible through the porthole. The caption reads Seville Sunset. If only it had been around when Mary needed it. The third picture is of King Henry the Eighth being presented with a jar of marmalade, with a caption reading Seville Sunset. Good enough to present to a king. In this one, the sun is setting into the hills behind his throne. I now see that all three shots have a second, smaller caption across the bottom of the page: Marmalade. A Great British Tradition.

  “What do you think?” asks Paul eagerly. He’s not overly cool, Paul. Could do with a little of that icy arrogance practiced by so many agency people.

  “I think it’s brilliant.” And I do. I think the campaign could do with some fine tuning, but it’s pretty good. And a damn sight better than the ones that preceded it. Marmalade and its history are exotic enough; we don’t need to shout about it with vulgar references to lovers and Mauritian sunsets.

  Paul punches the air, and Nicki claps her hands together. The other two aren’t sure what to do, but since this is clearly a celebratory moment, they allow slim smiles to creep onto their faces.

  We spend the next hour or so talking about the campaign in more detail. Should the captions read exactly like this, or would different words be better? Can we be sure that people will recognize the historical figures, or do we need to be more obvious? Do we need to place a potted version of the story behind the picture in the corner of each advertisement, or on the opposite page, just in case people don’t get it?

  But basically, we are there. We have the idea. The rest is all about execution, and that’s the job of Paul and his two trusty side-kicks, who are at present both furiously scribbling notes. I lean back in my chair for a minute to take a breather from the intense discussion. And while I’m at it I say a silent but heartfelt thank you to C. Anne Wilson. Unbelievably, intermingled with my gratitude to C. Anne is a trace of appreciation for Anna, who, whatever else you might say about her, helped to jolt me out of that professional no-man’s-land I’ve been wallowing in for more than a year now. Wasn’t she really only telling me something my father told me a thousand times when I was growing up, and which I must often have greeted with rolling eyes and scornful sighs but somehow absorbed?: If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

  NEITHER ANNA WYATT nor C. Anne Wilson are much use, though, when you’re trying to decide on an outfit for a date with an electrician with whom you’ve exchanged inappropriate innuendo. According to the message left by Gary on my machine this afternoon, we’re to meet at The Sparrow first, then go on to a local Italian restaurant he’s been to before. That sounds like jeans and a shirt to me. But which shirt? The choice will be crucial. In a dialogue with myself that sounds as if it’s been taken straight from Marina’s notes, I determine that it must neither be too tight nor too loose, too low-cut nor too matronly, too plain (not trying hard enough) nor too fancy (trying way too hard).

  I have nothing at all in my wardrobe that meets all of these criteria. With time running short I opt for my Max Mara V-neck with a white lace camisole peeping out of the top rather than the white shirt or high-necked T-shirt I usually wear underneath it. I’ve ditched the Uplifter in favor of my newly purchased floral number.

  I descend to the sitting room, where Jill (who does do evenings if not nights) is sitting watching Changing Rooms with Millie. Jack is lying on the floor moving toy soldiers into formation. Millie looks up as I enter the room, and manages to prick my precarious selfconfidence in one fell swoop.

  “Mummy. Are you still going out? You don’t look very dressed up.”

  “Yes, I’m going out, but just to a pub so I don’t have to dress up. But do I look nice? I’ve done my eyes, see,” I say, bending down for her to inspect my shimmery brown and pink eye shadow, painstakingly applied with a technique I hope resembles the one Mel used on me last week.

  “Ooh yes. That’s pretty,” she says. “And you smell nice.”

  “Good. Now please be good for Jill. Bed at eight for you, Jack, and eight-thirty for you, Millie. Jill, I won’t be too late.”

  Jill has already told me I mustn’t be late as she’s driving to Swanage for an antique bear exhibit early in the morning, something for which I’m quite grateful. A firm deadline will prevent me from getting carried away, having one too many drinks and doing something I’m sure to regret.

  The Sparrow is a five-minute walk away. Approaching it I have an overwhelming desire to turn and run in the other direction. This is not something I’m used to doing. This isn’t even something I’m sure I want to be doing. It seemed like a good idea last week, and when I was recounting my triumph at the seminar, but now the prospect of walking alone into a pub to meet someone I know nothing about except that he’s very likely not my type seems like madness. Right now, I’d so much rather be at home watching other people going on nerve-wracking dates in Friends.

  What stops me from actually turning around at the door and running back home I’m not entirely sure. But I know what stops me from leaving once I’m inside. Because I spot him immediately, slouched alluringly in a corner seat opposite a beer. My breath is taken away, as they say, partly by the mere sight of him, waiting for me, and partly by the memory of those sensations I felt last week in my kitchen. All that heat, and tension. That knotted stomach. And this is all before we’ve exchanged a word. Steady, girl.

  Gary sees me walking across the pub and gets up from his seat. “Hiya” he says, kissing me on one cheek and moving along his seat to make room for me. Now I’m really in trouble, I think. There’s not even a table to protect me from myself.

  He doesn’t seem nervous. He’s obviously not overcome by inappropriate emotions or uncontrollable urges. Perhaps he’s used to this sort of thing. Or perhaps I misread the signs last week, and he just doesn’t fancy me that much.

  He asks me what I’d like to drink then orders it and turns toward me, lifting one knee and resting it at an angle on the padded bench. “So, how are the lights holding up?” he asks. The way his eyes are twinkling, you’d think he was asking me how I like my new vibrator.

  I didn’t misread the signs.

  “Pretty well, I think. At least none have fallen out onto my head so far.”

  “That’s good. I always like to do a good job.”

  Then silence. Where do we go from here? We have to start pre
tty much at the beginning, create some sort of context for this evening. I opt for the banal but workmanlike inquiry about his day.

  “So, did you have a busy day today? Rushing around, lots of jobs?”

  “Nah. Not too bad. Had a couple of other things to do this morning, so I only did one or two electrical jobs. With my dad.”

  The mention of dad gives me the straw I’ve been grasping for.

  “Do you get on well with your dad? I mean, is it difficult working together?”

  “Nah. He’s a really easygoing bloke. We get on really well. I work as much as I like really. No pressure.”

  So he’s a laid-back type. Doesn’t like to work too hard. Likes to come and go. If he were genuine long-term partner material that would be a strike against him, but as it is it’s quite appealing.

  “What about your parents? Do you get on well with them?” he asks. How is it that two people over the age of thirty have started off an evening talking about their parents? It’s as if we’re trying to steer ourselves onto safe ground, away from the quicksand we’d glimpsed last week.

  “My parents are great actually. They’ve been so supportive of me in the past two years, and well, all my life really. Almost anything I do is fine with them. And they help as much as they can. But they are both almost seventy, so there’s a limit.”

  “My mum died a long time ago,” he announces. “So it’s just me and my dad and my brother now.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Your brother—what’s he like?”

  Now that we are on to family the possibilities are endless. I hear about Gary’s brother (a painter and decorator, also unmarried) and he hears about Nick and Kate and the boys, and Jack and Millie. We stay on this topic for what must be half an hour, our primal impulses simmering gently in the background. By the time this conversation has finished and I’m into my second (very large) glass of wine, I’ve discovered that he is thirty-two. In my present state this worries me less than it thrills me.

  At some point during our conversation Gary slipped his arm along the back of the bench, and moved a few inches closer to me. I’m suddenly acutely aware of his arm there, tantalizingly close to my shoulder. Then, unexpectedly, he leans in toward me, and I’m sure he’s going to kiss me, right here under the bright lights of The Sparrow surrounded by tables full of lads drinking their way toward an inevitable curry.

  Instead of kissing me he just whispers, “I’m getting hungry. Are you?” I’m enfeebled by anticipation.

  I’m not hungry for an Italian meal, but I make all the right noises and we leave The Sparrow. Gary places his hand at the small of my back and ushers me out onto the street and toward Giovanni’s, a favorite of his that he’s sure I will love. A few seconds into the short walk he takes my hand. It’s all too fast, I know, but at the same time there’s something natural, even inevitable about it.

  Giovanni’s is small, cramped even. The tables are small too, so that as we sit down at ours in the corner near the window I lean in and nearly set my hair on fire on the candle that’s burning in the middle. Our knees are within millimeters of touching under the table, and there will be no need to lean in to be heard. We can’t get any closer. If this is all part of a plan, it’s a very good one. It would never have worked for the dinner with Alan, but it’s working wonders tonight.

  I’m vaguely aware of ordering seafood linguine with a side salad. As it happens I barely make a dent in it, so distracted am I by our conversation. It turns out that Gary is a Hemingway fan, and has read every one of his novels and every biography ever written about him. (I give myself a mental rap on the knuckles for earlier having branded him a likely illiterate.) When we’ve finished with Ernest we move on to nonsense. Just flirtatious inanities and lots of laughter. And all the while I’m staring at his chocolate brown eyes and the lock of jet-black hair that keeps falling across his forehead, and imagining the bare spot above his jeans that I glimpsed last week. And basking in his engaging smile. He has one tooth that overlaps another in the top row and lends his expression a certain mischievousness.

  Later I will realize that the dark eyes and hair remind me of David. But I don’t realize this now. I’m too wrapped up in the heady experience of being adored over a red-and-white-checked tablecloth, in full, if dim and candlelit, view of twenty-five fellow diners.

  The waiter clears away my half-finished linguine and Gary’s empty mussel shells and we both start twirling our red wineglasses around self-consciously. Then, just as I can see the waiter returning with a pudding menu out of the corner of my eye, Gary lifts my chin with one finger and kisses me. The first kiss is polite and gentle. The second one is not. When I look up the waiter has vanished. We are obviously not going to need pudding.

  I’m hoping for another kiss like the second one when Gary whispers something that sounds like, “I’ve got a secret to tell you.”

  “Go on. Tell me,” I say. What’s he going to tell me? More silly, sexy nonsense? That he was attracted to me all those months ago when he first came to the house with his father?

  “I’m not just a boring electrician you know. I have another job. Something much more interesting.”

  Where is this going? I wonder. We’re way beyond discussing the job thing. My curiosity is piqued.

  “Do you want to know what it is?”

  “Okay . . .” I say, smiling.

  “I run an exotic dance company. I audition exotic dancers for clubs. That’s what I was doing for most of today. Most of the time the girls come in to audition in bikinis, suspenders, tassels, that sort of thing. But today, there was one in a nurse’s uniform. And you know what I was thinking all day? I’d love to see you in that nurse’s uniform.”

  Then he kisses me again. An even less polite kiss than the last time. So impolite in fact that I nearly choke.

  “How about it? Will you do that for me sometime?” he says after retrieving his tongue from my throat.

  Like puddles in the glaring sun, my desire has evaporated. I’m not the dressing up type. And I’ve always been vaguely repelled by the thought of men who are. In the space of a minute and a half Gary has managed to eradicate a week’s worth of pent up voracity and annihilate the potency of two perfectly good kisses.

  I don’t let on to Gary just how much of a turn-off his exotic dance company and the nurse’s uniform idea are to me. I joke with him as we pay the bill, keeping things light. “Nurse’s uniform? I’d be better as an air hostess, don’t you think?” No, I can’t have coffee at his place because I have to get home to Jill. Bear convention. Sure, we can do dinner again, but I’m very busy over the next few weeks. Very.

  I think he’s a little shocked by the abrupt end to what was such a promising evening. When we reach my house, instead of allowing him to give me the tongue treatment again, I press my fingers to my lips, then to his, and disappear through my front door shouting, “Thanks for dinner.”

  Perhaps I’m highly unusual. Perhaps other women go along with his ideas because he’s so attractive. Perhaps other women find his sideline in tassels intriguing. Something to add spice to their relationship.

  I’m disappointed, but my disappointment is dulled by relief at being back inside my little house, knowing I’m going up to my bedroom alone to sleep in a pair of flannels. Tonight has taught me a lesson; the very lesson that Marina intended me to learn as it happens. You really should never judge a book by its cover. Exotic comes in all kinds of packages, and exotic isn’t always what you want.

  CHAPTER 28

  SHOPPING

  I’ve had enough of ducks. They are all right, up to a point. And they’ve served some sort of purpose for me I suppose. I feel differently than I did two weeks ago, as if I’ve thrown off the covers and decided to get out of bed after two and a half years in a half-slumber.

  But in the end the ducks are too much trouble. Going out with people you know from the start are not your type can backfire on you. Now I have Alan calling twice a week and will probably find myself being stalked by a ma
n wielding a nurse’s uniform. I don’t have the stamina to try all this again on a third target, so I plan to give up on the Duck Decoy idea while I’m ahead.

  It will be safer to stick to the parts of Marina’s program of activities that I can control. Like the Place Plan. I can choose where I’m going to go, and with whom I will make eye contact when I’m there. I might carry a prop, but if someone I don’t like expresses interest in it I’ll cut them dead. There will be no more of this nonsense about trying people on for size and stretching my boundaries. From now on, it’s only sure bets for me.

  First on today’s agenda is the weekly shop, which is what Millie, Jack and I are currently driving toward. I normally shop at Tesco, but in the interests of trying out new places we’re driving to Waitrose. It’s a bit farther and quite a lot more expensive, but once won’t hurt. I despise shopping with children in tow, but today I have no choice. I’ve bribed both of them with a promise that they will both be entitled to choose three items for the shopping cart, regardless of how unhealthy an option they represent.

  Waitrose is buzzing, even at 9:30 a.m. Clearly Waitrose shoppers are the types who need to get their shopping out of the way before going on to do more interesting things. I’ve shopped here in the past, but I’d forgotten about its greatest asset: it carries Skippy peanut butter, which Clara introduced me to and I now rate as the only peanut butter worth eating. There are some things we British don’t do a quarter as well as the Americans, and peanut butter is one of them.

  We are shopping for the week, but we are also shopping for Sunday lunch with David. So I’m having enormous trouble thinking about quantities. This isn’t an unusual problem when you’re a single parent who only has to feed the complete family on alternate weekends. Your shopping is completely without rhythm. Some weeks you’re buying family-size roast chickens and large bags of turkey dinosaurs and jammy dodgers in anticipation of weekends with two small children and their friends. The next week you’re hunting down single servings of cream cheese and small salad bags like other singletons. This week, with both the children and David to cater for, I’m finding myself temporarily overwhelmed by the task.